The Killing Flower, at Buxton Festival

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Crucial encounters between the Duke and Duchess are fine-tuned to a vast emotional range in this exquisite opera

Minimalism takes on a whole new meaning in the work of Salvatore Sciarrino. His surname is an onomatopoeic conceit of his music: a hushed cobweb of sighs and whispers, not a note or a breath wasted. Those whispers travel too seldom to Britain. We have Music Theatre Wales to thank for their Buxton Festival staging of the UK premiere of Sciarrino’s short and exquisite opera, The Killing Flower.

Presented in a double-bill with Kelvin Thomas’s now legendary performance of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King, Sciarrino’s opera is also fascinated — though in a quite different mode — by